In our ward there are several families with the same last names. When we print the Bishop's report upon which he writes everyone's Tithing Settlement status, all ward members are listed alphabetically. As a result, all of the "Allen" families are scrambled together in one group and it makes it cumbersome for the Bishop to then sort them out when it's time to fill in their status.

Can the ward members be listed by Household on this report?

(It's not just the Allens. We have other families which share common last names too.)

GregAnderson wrote:Can the ward members be listed by Household on this report?

Quite a while ago, MLS added this ability. Just go to Finances > Tithing Settlement > Print Household Statements. You can then select the household(s) you want to print statements for, and they will be grouped by household as you requested.

Questions that can benefit the larger community should be asked in a public forum, not a private message.

I can see how there would be some advantage in grouping by household on that single printed report. But on the other hand, it might also make it more difficult to find people with different last names, since they would no longer be sorted alphabetically. That could be a pro or a con -- one might think of little Bobby Jones, who is the son of Sister Smith by her previous marriage, and being part of the Smith family and try to find him under S, but it's also possible that you would look for Jones under J and not find him.

In any case, given the way MLS now works, a helpful clerk could help the bishop by making some notations on the report. He could take the freshly printed report and locate the few situations where there are multiple families with the same name, and put an H by each member of the Hyrum Smith family, a G by each member of the George Smith family, etc., so that the bishop can quickly identify the members of each family.

Questions that can benefit the larger community should be asked in a public forum, not a private message.

The problem in our ward is that the families which share the same last name are usually large families. I've tried to color-code the families with a highlighter but this often makes it look like more of a mess. The listing might look something like this:

This makes it very easy for the Bishop to overlook writing something about a baby's status (since he won't talk to the baby specifically) or forget to fill in information about someone's wife (because she donates with her husband and doesn't have a dollar amount by her name).

While I'm at it, when it's time to enter all of this information into the computer, it would be nice to be able to mark an entire household's status at once (since it's common for the whole household to have the same status and that status was either reported by the members or by the Bishop for the entire household).